Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War

by Donald McCaig

  Captain Gatewood shifted his horse to reveal Alexander and said, “Colonel, this is the man I told you about. He can read. He can write. He might have a head on his shoulders.”

  The colonel inspected Alexander. “Soldier, I’m told you were a schoolmaster.”

  “Sir, I am a graduate of Yale College, a professor of antiquities.”

  “Yes. Well, tempus fugit. I shall require you to carry messages, verbal and written, between myself, General Early, and the regiments on our flanks. Do you understand our dispositions? Atkinson on our right, Paxton on our left. Down the hill to our front are Maxcy Gregg’s Carolinians. Right front, Archer—he’s got Tennesseans, Georgians. Left front, Thomas’s Georgians.”

  Briskly Alexander repeated: “Yes, sir. Atkinson, Paxton, Gregg, Archer, Thomas. Yes, sir.”

  “Will you remember when the shot starts flying?”

  “Yes, sir. If I cannot exactly recollect an officer or position, I will make inquiry.”

  The colonel eyed his captain. “You vouch for him, Gatewood?”

  “He’ll try, Colonel. Can’t ask for more than that.”

  The colonel extracted a leather-bound notebook from his breast pocket, scribbled, and gave the paper to Alexander. “Deliver this to Maxcy Gregg and bring me his reply.”

  Alexander saluted and started down the hill.

  Each Confederate regiment commanded a quarter mile of hillside. Soldiers dug shallow pits or piled brush in front of their positions. Some cooked breakfast.

  Alexander’s stomach clenched at the smell of fatback boiling. At Virginia State Penitentiary, a man was provided for!

  “Watch where you’re going, sluefoot!”

  “I am Colonel Walker’s courier. Where might I find Colonel Gregg?”

  “He’s a general, Maxcy is. Find the South Carolina colors and you’ll find Maxcy.”

  Alexander crossed a shallow ravine, memorizing landmarks for his return, ignoring curious stares and the jibes prompted by his new uniform. The sun was well up and the cloud sea was thinning from solid white to misty gray. Poets had always been inspired by war. The Iliad, the Aeneid, Caesar’s terse Commentaries. What grand work, carrying messages between commanders, neither the originator of messages nor he who must take action upon the information contained therein. “Pardon me,” he asked a soldier whittling a stick, “where can I find General Gregg?”

  “Behind yonder thicket,” the soldier pointed.

  “Are you prepared?”

  “Prepared for what?” The soldier had a decided cast to his left eye.

  “The Federal assault.”

  “Nope.” The soldier went back to his whittling. “I’m skulking to the rear plumb terrified.”

  The elderly figure alone in the clearing had to be General Gregg. His full black beard was streaked with gray.

  “Sir! Message from Colonel Walker, 44th Virginians!”

  The general was staring unhappily at the brushy swamp below him.

  “Sir!” Alexander shouted.

  The general was startled, “Why didn’t you speak up, son? You don’t want to go creepin’ up on a man like that. Speak up like a man!”

  As the general read Walker’s message, a flush crawled up his neck. He crumpled the message and shoved it back to its messenger. “You take this back to your colonel and tell him he’s a horse’s ass. Tell him he’s got Carolinians in his front and we’ll protect you Virginians as long as we are able. Now git!”

  Alexander was well away before he uncrumpled Colonel Walker’s message: “General Gregg, If your damn firebrands hadn’t fired on Sumter, we’d all be home with our wives and children toasting our feet by the fire. Your Obt. Serv., James A. Walker, Colonel, Walker’s Brigade.”

  A weight lifted off Alexander’s shoulders. Apparently he had misunderstood again. He had thought this a terrible war: life, death, the legions at Cannae, Caesar facing the barbarians. . . . Alexander had been willing to do his duty. But others, officers no less, thought it a joke. Alexander pasted an amused smile on his face. He dawdled and whistled and his eyes searched faces for sign that others were in on the secret.

  Duncan’s companies, sixty men, were in reserve, so Duncan left them and followed the ridgeline from Pickett’s regiment to the knoll where artillerists had placed fourteen guns. A lieutenant Duncan knew directed men throwing up earthworks. “Hello, Elliot. What a field of fire.”

  “Oh, we’ll hit ’em hard. But if they get amongst us, we’re finished. Too many trees. Can’t retire napoleons through a forest, you know. You on the line?”

  “Reserves. Walker’s brigade.”

  “We’re ordered not to fire, no matter what the Federals do, not until we’re told. I hope the men can stand it. I am told Burnside’s got a hundred thousand men under the fog. Isn’t this grand! You, there! Don’t touch that gun! I want that gun pointed where I’ve got it, exactly.”

  The next time Duncan stopped, Gypsy lowered her head to graze.

  The light on the fog’s surface was pure white gold, painful to the eye. He wondered how the Federal soldiers felt, somewhere deep in the mist, straining to see the hills and what faced them this day. They would be taking comfort from the men beside them, from the routine preparations that preceded attack.

  Gypsy lifted her head. The west wind dispersed the fog and ruffled the hair on Duncan’s neck. “Good God,” he whispered.

  Tens of thousands of Federal soldiers in companies, brigades, regiments, divisions, each with its own banner, each with its own cluster of officers.

  Their pioneers hacked down hedgerows on either side of the Richmond Stage Road, levering trees into the ditches as bridges for the artillery, while others dismantled the fences that would impede the infantry.

  Confederate skirmishers retired across the railroad amid a flurry of gunpowder blossoms.

  Duncan Gatewood had never imagined anything like this beautiful orderliness: the armed musculature of the great Federal army in bright array upon the mile-wide plain. Their bands struck up and Federal artillerymen raced forward with their guns and pivoted neatly, the horseholder jogging the horses to the rear while his mates wrestled their guns into place.

  As one, they, It, the army, started forward, and the hairs on Duncan’s neck stood erect. They were irresistible—how could mere men stand against them?

  But from a thicket at the far right of the advancing ranks came a puff of smoke, another. The neatly organized Federal ranks rippled, then faltered, as a lone Confederate artillery piece, out in front of its own lines, opened fire.

  The Federal artillery promptly abandoned all plans to hammer the Confederate hills and wheeled to face this crazy interloper firing where no gun should have been.

  Through his glass, Duncan watched the Confederate gun crew: eight men and a single officer hopping and dancing like lunatics. The gun barked again and again, smashing the packed ranks as though men were so many dominoes.

  From the bluff across the river, heavy Federal guns bellowed impotent salvos. As soon as the Federal field artillery found the range of that impertinent gun, the gunners withdrew it twenty yards and fired again, moved obliquely, and fired once more.

  The massive Federal advance lost heart, and thousands of infantrymen lay down in the mud they’d created by their passage. Like an angry man trying to smash a pesky fly, the Federal artillery flailed at the lone Confederate gun. They rained tons of shot on that thicket, but wherever their deadly metal struck, the gun was elsewhere. Dismounted Confederate cavalry sallied forth to protect the gun, to interpose itself between the gun and Federal infantry. The gun was a goad, the gravest of insults. It evoked great thunderings, and so many shells descended on that thicket they briefly obliterated it, but as the smoke cleared the Confederate gun barked anew and no man among the thousands of Federal soldiers dared to raise his head. Like a bear bitten by a louse, a tycoon bedeviled by a mosquito—the offended host was too big to fight anything so small.

  The Federal army hunched, flailed, stomped the eart
h, and bellowed. For an hour, that gun delayed the advance before it fled back to its own lines, its gunners clinging to the limber and the horses’ harnesses.

  The Federals reorganized. Mighty regiments countermarched. New batteries came forward and unlimbered. Soldiers who’d dropped to the mud during the artillery duel remained in the mud. Some propped haversacks under their heads and slept.

  Duncan blinked. In a single hour, what had been a terrible and beautiful army had been reduced to clots of muddy men on a muddy floodplain. Duncan chucked Gypsy in the ribs. He had been too long away from his men.

  Catesby Byrd’s company was tucked under the trees, rested and fed. At a spring men lined up to fill their wooden canteens. Although there’d been firing, none had been directed at them. Catesby was writing Leona.

  Leona had informed him of Sallie’s parole into the hospital, but Catesby wasn’t sure whether he should mention Alexander. Death takes a particular interest in war’s novitiates, and Alexander might not survive his first battle. Leona was in deep mourning for Baby Willie, and Catesby would spare her more grief. How he wished he had seen his Willie, just once! If he’d not enlisted, things might have turned out differently. Many men of Catesby’s generation had avoided the war. His neighbor James Warwick discovered pressing business in Europe. And in a Richmond newspaper Catesby read that five hundred wagons departed for the West from St. Louis every day. This war had produced many bold pioneers.

  Catesby Byrd wrote: “Your brother is well and in high spirits. Though his beloved Gypsy has not been shod since Rufus shod her at Stratford, the horse has more flesh than her rider! Have Rufus and Jesse been found?”

  Hurriedly, Walker’s officers abandoned the ridge and skidded down the back slope. Duncan tethered Gypsy in a thick stand of white oak saplings. “Federal guns unlimbering. They mean to do us mischief.”

  Catesby opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment the Federal guns spoke: a stutter, a brag, a roar. Catesby clapped hands over his ears.

  The Federal guns sought the Confederate guns on the hills. They hurled solid shot and explosive shell, their iron insults shearing through oak and ash, brittle hickory, chestnut and elm. Outgunned two to one, with less reliable ordnance, the Confederate gunners declined to fight. General Jackson had made too clear the fate of the impatient gunner who fired early and gave away his gun’s position. In shallow pits they lay beside their gun carriages and prayed no unlucky shell would crash into a powder-filled limber box. Fire, shift a degree, fire again, shift a degree, Federal napoleons invited the Confederates to abandon this childish hide-and-seek, to play a more manly game.

  Since the Federal gunners suspected Confederate batteries would be emplaced near the ridgetop, that’s where they concentrated their fire. Projectiles cleared the ridge with yards to spare, and by the inexorable laws of physics, lost altitude as velocity diminished and crashed into the reserve brigades of Early’s division, which, tucked behind that sheltering ridge, had not thought to dig in or otherwise protect themselves.

  Metal whizzed through the trees, striking trunks that had stood for centuries with the stout whack of an axman’s first blow. Shivered by the fusillade, the trees relieved themselves of dead limbs, and soldiers cowering below were deluged by falling timber of all sizes, some large enough to crack skulls. Despite this hazard, soldiers sought cover under the biggest trees they could find, and newcomers panting for safety were not always greeted hospitably.

  Shells exploding among the reserve artillery behind Walker’s brigade killed horses and shattered limber carriages, while frantic artillerists lashed their guns to the rear.

  One horse was on its forelegs, down in the back, its neck stretched out in what Catesby knew would be a scream had the cannonade permitted hearing it. Shells flew over the ridgeline like flights of fast black crows. Solid shot thumped into heaps of autumn’s fallen leaves and exhaled them so they swirled again among the trees, resurrected by the barrage. Slivers of hot metal hissed where they lay. Tattered by concussions, smoke drifted like ghost vines.

  When the earth shook, Alexander was hurled off his feet and bit down on his tongue, and the blood which gushed from his mouth astonished and frightened him. How much blood did he have? Was he shot in the face? His fingers patted his face all over, but they were numbed, as if he were wearing gloves, and he could not tell if he was wounded. He looked up to ask—surely Colonel Walker would tell him—but, sheltered by a ledge, the colonel was calmly conferring with an aide. Hands clutched to his face, swallowing his own blood: so thick, so rich, so salty—Alexander couldn’t say a word.

  The ground heaved under Alexander again and deadly steel whisked by overhead. On hands and knees, he scurried toward the ledge where the colonel stood as if he hadn’t a care in the world. His aide was barefoot and his sleeve darkened by blood, but neither man deigned to notice.

  Alexander’s leg was wet and hot: he had pissed himself. His haversack contained a second pair of trousers, but he could not recall, for the life of him, where he’d set it down.

  The colonel’s barefoot aide ran up the ridge in a low crouch as black death crows cleared his head by inches.

  Alexander shivered. His wet crotch was getting cold.

  Hunched over, Walker’s aide duckwalked the last few terrible feet to that crest, and Alexander blinked his eyes, expecting him to become, instantly, a fine red mist. But the man was still alive, shifting to his left, seeking a better vantage point.

  A shell hit ten feet from where Alexander lay. At first it was just a black something, but it took a bounce and Alexander drew himself up small so the explosion wouldn’t kill him, and the dud shell stopped rolling and the colonel pointed at it and was laughing, laughing.

  Duncan Gatewood thought of nothing, which was a gift he’d acquired, to think of nothing. A vague comfortable feeling suffused his bones—he was relaxed enough that he might slip into the earth beneath him, and his mind drifted, touching here and there, without comment. In a hollow formed by the roots of a tremendous white oak, Duncan lay with his cheek pressed against one root and his foot braced against another, dreaming about his childhood, the boy he’d been. He remembered Uncle Agamemnon. Years ago he’d happened on old Uncle doing his mumbo jumbo beside the river. Uncle crouched in a crossed circle outlined in white ash, chanting in a language Duncan did not know. The young master slinked away and never went near that place again. That magic spot was Stratford land the Gatewoods didn’t own.

  The silence, when it came, was shocking. When the Federal guns quit, blue regiments reformed across the plain. Rubbing sleep out of his eyes, Duncan joined Colonel Walker’s aide on the ridgetop.

  “Will you look at that!”

  “Jesus Christ Almighty!”

  “There! That’s the Bucktails?”

  “Those in the black hats. They’re the Iron Brigade. They gave us unadulterated hell at Manassas.”

  “Your eyes are better than mine,” Colonel Walker said, lifting his glasses.

  A rank of infantry, two deep, at a steady step, a thousand yards wide, and a second rank, two deep, behind the first. Officers rode before their troops.

  “It’s a damn dress parade,” Duncan breathed.

  Dead silence from the Confederates on the hills. Dead silence from the advancing Federals. Not a sound, not a bird call, not the whinny of a horse nor the sharp crack of the sharpshooter’s rifle—the regiments came on like something in a dream.

  “Come on,” Walker’s barefoot aide whispered fiercely. “Bring them shoes. Bring them shoes, hyar!”

  They swept over the dismantled fences.

  Someone was muttering, “Fire, fire. Please God, fire.” Colonel Walker’s saddle creaked as he leaned forward to see better.

  At exactly eight hundred yards, as per General Jackson’s prior orders, the Confederate guns opened up and blew the blue soldiers into rags. Guns in the fore, guns to the left flank, guns to the right; and maybe they weren’t the best guns and certainly not all their shells exploded, bu
t there were very many guns, pre-aimed at specific targets on the plain; so Confederate guns ate men.

  Some of the Federals ran, most flopped down where they stood, and some of the men who lay flat on that plain were still breathing and some had had life’s breath knocked out of them.

  Now they knew the Confederate guns’ positions, Federal guns made their reply. Guns were rushed onto the field, quickly disconnected from their limbers, swung into place, and aimed. Now they had their targets, now they would take revenge! Federal shells tossed clods of frozen earth into the air and part-buried sweaty Confederate gunners. Federal shells disemboweled an officer’s prized gray mare. Federal batteries killed gunners, smashed limbers, and hit an ammunition wagon, which blew up with a tremendous crash.

  After the Confederate guns were silenced, the Federal regiments regained their feet, re-formed, and surged forward, this time at the double-quick. The Confederate riflemen had orders not to fire until the Federals were right on top of them: the railroad was their mark.

  “They are not cowards,” Colonel Walker remarked.

  When the Federals reached the railroad, the woods erupted with musket fire, a long rolling blast. The Federal lines melted as if flesh and bone were no more substantial than theater scrims. Officers were whisked off their horses, color bearers lived scant seconds before they fell. Like great wounded beasts the federal Regiments groaned and reeled from side to side, stung, stung, stung.

  One regiment howled and fired and disintegrated into individual soldiers who charged across the tracks and into the swamp at the foot of the hill.

  Colonel Walker turned to Duncan. “Does Gregg know?”

  “He’s in reserve!”

  “But there’s nobody in front of him. Not a soul. Those Federals will surprise him! Courier!”

  The colonel handed a note to Alexander. “Take this to General Gregg. It is no jest this time, soldier. Deliver the message into General Gregg’s hands, and hurry!”